NC Museum of Art Expansion

When the plane's wheels touched ground this morning at 7am, it was still dark in Barcelona.

Each January, the American Institute of Architects awards its annual Honor Awards to the top designs in architecture, interior architecture, and regional and urban design.

No Object is an Island: New Dialogues with the Cranbrook Collection is the provocative exhibition that will reopen the expanded and renovated Cranbrook Art Museum at Cranbrook Academy of Art on November 11, 2011. Inside and around the landmark building, designed by renowned Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, the exhibition will pair the work of 50 leading contemporary artists and designers with an equal number of objects from Cranbrook’s outstanding permanent collection of 20th- and 21st-century art and design.

No Object is an Island is organized around six themes—Craft, Site, Comfort, Resistance, Process, and Fiction– each of which connotes a period of innovation at Cranbrook Academy of Art and presents a body of work that suggests common points of departure in the pursuit of creative expression and original art.

Last week I got a sneak preview of the Oakland Museum of California, a Kevin Roche-designed museum in Oakland that's set to reopen on Saturday, May 1st.